Insurgents of the Sea: Institutional and Economic Opportunities for Maritime Piracy

Abstract

While piracy may evoke romanticized visions of swashbuckling, rum swigging, and skirt chasing pirates hoisting the Jolly Roger, maritime piracy has changed substantially by taking advantage of modernization and substantial upgrading of the weapons, vessels, and weapons it employs. In addition, as documented by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), the frequency of pirate attacks has increased significantly, with more than 2,600 piracy incidents occurring since 2004. The authors argue that piracy is a result of permissive institutional environments and the lack of legal forms of employment in states' fishing sectors. The authors investigate these arguments empirically using data for all countries with coastlines in the 1995-2007 period. The empirical analyses show that state weakness and reductions in fisheries production values affect piracy as expected. These findings suggest that international efforts in combating piracy should center on improving the institutional environments and labor opportunities driving maritime piracy.

The New Barbary Wars: Forecasting Maritime Piracy

“…Long shorelines and or archipelagic configurations provide both safe havens for pirates and ensure law enforcement is difficult and expensive, suggesting that even moderately strong states may struggle to deter and capture pirates when sanctuaries in concealed bays and coves remain ubiquitous . While Hastings () does not observe a relationship between coast length and type of pirate attack, Daxecker and Prins () find that longer shorelines produce large substantive increases in pirate incidents. Similarly, states located in close proximity to major chokepoints may experience more piracy as a result of their geographic location, but these arguments have not yet been explored systematically (Coggins )…”

“…Some research points out that piracy requires skills that are enjoyed by only a small subset of a country's population (Murphy ; Daxecker and Prins ;). Raiding a local business on land requires only a weapon and will, but at sea, boat handling and navigational skills are critical to success.…”

“…Iyigun and Ratisukpimol () find GDP per capita to correlate with variation in pirate attacks and Jablonski and Oliver () observe increases in the price of labor‐intensive goods to drive pirate attacks higher. Daxecker and Prins () directly address changes in a country's fishing sector and find that decreases in annual fish catches correlate with increasing numbers of pirate incidents.…”

“…Since domestic order and a free and fair market place benefit all, leaders in democratic states will consequently make attacking illegal activity a much higher priority of government compared to their autocratic counterparts. Evidence (albeit limited) does suggest that when one controls for other critical factors, such as state fragility, economic deprivation, and coastline length, democracies do experience fewer hijackings than autocracies, although overall piracy incidents show no such regime distinction (Daxecker and Prins ). Drawing on research on civil war, an alternative argument on regime type would be to expect that regimes in the middle of the democracy–autocracy spectrum are most prone to piracy.…”

“…Increasing the risk of capture and punishment not only reduces piracy through law enforcement but also reduces the expected utility to individuals for such illegal activity. Daxecker and Prins (), for example, observe military force size reducing the number of pirate incidents within a country's territorial waters.…”